Vigée Le Brun

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the French portrait painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755 - 1842). From her teens she delighted her high society subjects in and around Paris, notably Marie Antoinette who she painted around 30 times, and she invariably found ways to show her sitters at their best. Some critics were affronted that she, a young woman, dared paint at all and, when they saw how good her portraits were, some spread a rumour that surely this could not really be her work and she must have had a secret male lover finishing her portraits in a studio. The French Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun out of France and so she set off from one European court to another to find more success from Naples to Vienna to St Petersburg and to London, eventually settling back in France. Today her works are on show in major galleries around the world. With Rosalind Polly Blakesley Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge Robert Wenley Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham And Francesca Whitlum-Cooper Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings at The National Gallery, London. Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Joseph Baillio, Katharine Baetjer and Paul Lang (eds), Vigée Le Brun (exhibition catalogue in English, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016) Joseph Baillio et al., Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun: 1755-1842 (exhibition catalogue in French, Grand Palais, Paris, 2015/16) Rosalind P. Blakesley, Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great (Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd, 2023), especially chapter 8 ‘The Triumphant Refugee’ Lucy Davies, Vigée Le Brun: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat (National Gallery Global, 2025) Angelica Goodden, The Sweetness of Life: A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1997) Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists (Apollo, 2025) Jordana Pomeroy, Daring: The Life and Art of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Getty Publications, 2025) Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1997) Paris Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 (Paul Mellon Centre, Yale University Press London, 2022) Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (trans. Sian Evans), The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (Camden Press, 1989) Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Souvenirs de Madame Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (first published 1869; Tredition Classics, 2012) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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• 1:56Speaker 05

  Hello. The portrait painter Elizabeth Vigé-Lebrun, 1755 to 1842, delighted her high society subjects, showing them at their very best, notably Marie Antoinette, who she painted around 30 times. Some claimed Vigé-Lebrun's paintings were so good only because a man must be finishing them for her, while some were affronted that she, a young woman, dared to paint at all. Yet Vigé-Lebrun was indomitable, journeying from one European court to another after the French Revolution, and today her works are on show in major galleries around the world.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  With me to discuss Vigé-Lebrun are Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Master of Pembroke College and Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, Robert Wenley, Deputy Director of Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, and Francesca Whitlam-Cooper, Curator of later Italian, Spanish and French paintings at the National Gallery in London. Francesca Whitlam-Cooper, can you give us a bit about Vigé-Lebrun's background? Take us back to Paris in the second half of the 18th century.

• 3:16Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Well, she's born in the heart of Paris, really, a stone's throw from the Louvre, so very much in the centre of what was then the art world in Paris. She is born the daughter of an artist, a pastelist called Louis Vigé, who was celebrated for his portraits, and particularly his portraits in the pastel medium. So as opposed to oil, these are very dazzling portraits that are being made with coloured crayons, enormously popular in 18th century France. And I think that is probably the kind of thing that marks Vigé out, that opens this art world to her, is her father and the access that she gets with that. So she writes very beautifully about her father in her memoirs. She's obviously very close with him.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  There's a sense, and originally is he a very sociable, genial person? There's much description about the soirees, the family gatherings, the people he brings together, people from the art world, people from the world of finance or from music, these very convivial gatherings, which are then going to be quite important for her and how she establishes herself in Paris. But also just his passion for his arts. There's a lovely anecdote that he's all dressed up in his finery, ready to go out for dinner, pops back to the studio, puts his cap on to be able to make this small adjustment to a picture, and then, without realising, trots off to dinner, not wearing his wig but wearing his cap. So her father is not a member of the Académie Royale, so the French Royal Academy, but he is a member of the Artists' Guild in Paris, the Académie de Saint-Luc.

• 4:43Speaker 06

  She does get some education early on, although I think probably worth saying, on the one hand, amazing as a girl, that she did get education, on the other, reading, writing, catechism, embroidery, domestic arts, not really the kind of education you'd imagine necessarily for a great artist. But that's where she begins, that's where her story starts.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  So she is encouraged by her father, but what opportunities are there for young women who have a talent for painting?

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Frankly, almost none. I think it is worth pointing out that if you're looking not at women who paint, but women who are professional artists in the 17th and 18th century, almost without exception, they are the daughters of artists. And I think this is a question on a very, very practical level about access, that unless you are born into a family of artists, how would you have access either to the very stuff of picture making, I mean, the literal tools of the trade, the materials you need to become an artist, but also to someone who's going to train you or encourage a talent? So almost without exception, every woman who is a successful artist in this period comes from a family of artists.

• 5:52Speaker 06

  I think that's probably especially important in France, where by the time Vigé is growing up, the Royal Academy is 100 years old, it's very formal, it's very set in its ways, there's a very strict curriculum and process for becoming a professional artist. So if you were born male, you might train in an academy school, you might go to drawing sessions where you could copy from a male model. Well, absolutely not if you're a woman, that's an avenue that is completely closed to you. For all the young male artists, the great prize is the Prix de Rome, the Rome Prize, which every year sends the most talented students to the academy's outpost in Rome, where suddenly the world of the classical past and the great masters of the Renaissance is all opened up to you, you're paid to go and live and study and paint.

• 6:37Speaker 06

  But again, I mean, it's an absolute non-starter if you're a woman, it's an impossible set of circumstances. Equally, the great tragedy of her young life is that her father dies when she's still very young. So she's 12 when he dies unexpectedly, following a surgery. And she has a complicated relationship with her mother, but I think to her mother's great credit, the mother and then the network of artists, the family friends who are around them, recognise that they have to keep nurturing Vigé's talent. So she is enrolled in quite a modest local drawing school run by the wife of a fan painter. She has the opportunity to study a little bit in the Louvre. She has people like Plosser Zefernay, who's the great landscape painter, encouraging her, people actually literally showing her how to lay out oil paints on a palette, so

• 7:19Speaker 06

  that she has some chance of knowing how to work in the oil medium.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  So she starts her career at a relatively young age, but Polly Blakesley, how on earth does she become the portraitist for Marie Antoinette, her main portraitist?

• 7:36Speaker 06

  I think it starts at the point that she and her mother and her stepfather, who was not a man she got on well with, moved into one of the hôtels in Paris, they rented an apartment, and the main occupant of that hotel was her future husband, Mr Lebrun. And she, at this point, becomes acquainted with one of Paris's great art dealers, a real mover and shaker in the art scene, and she becomes acquainted with the sort of people he's hosting, as well as having met the people Francesca was describing. And she eventually marries him. It's not a thrillingly happy marriage.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  He uses her and he encourages her to paint, but he also uses her very much as a means of creating further income. She, of course, benefits from the contacts and the connections. So she becomes, she does become part of the salon that they together ran, which is a popular place to meet. And in some way, we're not completely sure, she's brought to the attention of Marie Antoinette. This is 1778. She's exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette. We can't know, but we might speculate that either Cortier's or possibly Marie Antoinette's mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, felt that there could be a connection here

• 8:57Speaker 06

  of these two women mobilising and having to navigate a world which was always going to be challenging to a certain extent.

• 9:05Speaker 05

  Just out of interest, how on earth did Marie Theresa in far-off Vienna get to hear of somebody like Vigé-Lebrun?

• 9:13Speaker 06

  There would have been correspondents. So these courts and these cities, they're so well interconnected. And so the word of up and coming artists would spread quite well between correspondents, between visiting diplomats, whatever it was. So she's invited to Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette, and she does a good job. I would say it's not a great job, it's not one of her great portraits, but she does a classic ceremonial court portrait where Marie Antoinette is in a beautiful dress.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  With panniers to extend the dress out to the sides. The bit that makes you realise it's a relatively early work of this ilk in Vige Lebrun's career is that to the right of Marie Antoinette, there's an enormous great pedestal with a bust of Louis XVI on it. And the proportions aren't great. This bust sort of looms over the sitter and later you would have a slightly more sort of felicitous arrangement. But she does well and it is approved of at court and it's sent to the mother, to Maria Theresa in Vienna. And then further sort of copies and iterations are produced for other European courts. One goes as far as the US. So this becomes a kind of calling card for her.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  Yes, one thing I noticed about the early portraits of Marie Antoinette is, is I thought I could still detect the Habsburg jaw and the droopy lip, which seemed to disappear a little over time.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  There's, there's a little bit of editing that goes on over time and she becomes slightly less afflicted with that family trait.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  We don't go in for portraits nowadays quite so much, of course, we photograph everything we see. So, so why was the portrait so high stakes for both the sitter and the artist?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so high stakes because for Vige Lebrun, she's got to nail it. You know, this is her moment to show she can do the most prestigious, best paid portraits for one of the greatest patrons there was at the time. The French royal family was, you know, you were, you were landing a big fish if you were painting for them. For Marie Antoinette, she's a young foreign queen. There are lots of rumours beginning to circulate about her already. And every single time she's painted, she, as part of the sort of portrait contract, if you like, she's making a statement about who she is and the position she occupies, whether she is deferring to her husband, whether she presents a threat.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  So getting that sort of balance between the kind of auteur, the, the dignity, the majesty of a portrait of a queen. But at the same time, this sense of her being, you know, she, she has to be maternal, she has to be very deferential to her husband. So, so getting that balance was a really tricky thing to achieve.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Thank you, Polly. And Robert Wenley, she painted women much more than she painted men. Why was that?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I think because largely she was more sympathetic to women and I think also they would naturally more likely gravitate to a female artist. Also, she was very adept at introducing fashion and conveying fashion. She was very fashionable herself. She liked to depict her female subjects in loose, informal, informal clothing, relatively speaking, to loosen up their bodies, as it were. And I think that's something that enabled them to be more expressive and her to capture that. But that's not to say that she wasn't successful with male portraits. I think the ratio is about four to one. But there's some very successful male portraits, such as Cologne in the Royal Collection, which is a magnificent painting, one of her masterpieces.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  But she was chaperoned, right?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, well, those men that she suspected were there partly because she was very good looking and they had maybe ulterior motives. Uh, there's an anecdote that she relays in her memoirs that if they gave her the glad eye, so to speak, she would paint them so that their eyes were looking into the far distance. That's how they were posed. And if she caught them glancing in her direction, taking away from the pose, she would immediately say to them, I'm doing the eyes now.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  And they would have to snap back and not be ogling her. That and her mother, who, as you say, was her chaperone, certainly in her early career, would be chucking away at this.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  And she was making a successful living. Is that, is that the case? How did the market work for her?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Well, she was very successful. Unfortunately, in her early career, a lot of her money was siphoned off first by her stepfather and then by her husband, who, running a business as he did and dealing with old master paintings, was constantly needing money to buy to replenish his stock. And so in that period, a lot of her money, she didn't retain. But later on in her career, certainly in the years, you know, the later seventeen eighties and when she was travelling through Europe, she was immensely successful. She was able to get away with charging top prices wherever she went. But she was so fashionable and so much in demand that she could do it and she became very wealthy indeed.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Francesca Whitlam-Cooper, the National Gallery has a famous self-portrait of her in a straw hat. Can you tell us the story of that painting?

• 14:34Speaker 06

  This is indeed known as the self-portrait in a straw hat. And the straw hat plays a very, very crucial role in the picture. So it's one of two versions of this self-portrait that are painted in seventeen eighty-two. On the back of a visit that Vige Lebrun makes with her husband in seventeen eighty-one to Brussels, and then also go to Amsterdam. But Brussels is the key place for that bit of the story because at that point in Brussels, there are the sales of the collections of the Prince of Lorraine. So he's died, his great artworks are coming up for sale. And obviously her husband is a picture dealer, as Robert said, is very interested in what he can go and see there. And we know that one of the pictures that they look at is a Rubens portrait, today known to be of

• 15:16Speaker 06

  his sister-in-law Susanna London, today also in the National Gallery, which is very felicitous. And Vige has long admired Rubens. She talks early on that, you know, Rubens is one of the people that she copies. But the picture in particular, the portrait of Susanna London, is known at the time as the chapeau de pie or the straw hat. And it's a complete misnomer because if you look at this portrait, you'll see immediately, it's a very black felt hat. It's not a straw hat at all.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Do we know at all why that happened?

• 15:43Speaker 06

  I think it's probably a sort of, a slight mishearing of chapeau de pie, which is straw, or chapeau de poil, which is felt. In the kind of, in, in the sort of eighteenth century French, it's thought to have been a mishearing, but it's regardless of what it looked like, it was called the straw hat picture. And the hat's importance to that Rubens picture is that it casts the most incredible shadow over the sitter's face. There's this really beautiful, complex light effect. And having seen that in Brussels at this very, very famous sale, it was a very well-known painting. She knew about it even before she'd gone and seen it in person. Vige Lebrun paints a self-portrait in which she places herself in a straw hat. And for me, I think there's several things that make this a really extraordinary thing to do.

• 16:22Speaker 06

  First is that she shows herself not only in the beautiful straw hat with an ostrich feather and wildflowers in a very beautiful silk dress, but also crucially holding her palette. So it is a self-portrait of her as a painter, very, very much advertising her profession. The second is that, you know, she's situating herself in a kind of old master context here. She's very explicitly quoting Rubens, anyone looking at the portrait in that time, that Rubens was so famous, they would have known that's what she's referring to. But she's not only quoting Rubens, actually, I think she's correcting the mistake because hers is a very beautiful straw hat. It's the sort of centre of the picture, you can't possibly avoid it. And she too, you know, absolutely nails these incredible light effects over the face.

• 17:03Speaker 06

  You've got her beautiful décolletage, again, this palette. So the whole thing, I think, is this very complex manifestation, if you will, of her identity, not only as an artist, not only as a woman, but also as someone who can equal and indeed maybe outdo the old masters.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  And I went to see the portrait in the National Gallery and the two, the Rubens and the Vige Lebrun are more or less next to each other.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  So you can compare.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  You can, you can compare and contrast and see which, which you prefer.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Polly Blakesley, she, she built up this very successful career in Paris with the collaboration to some extent of Marie Antoinette. And then, of course, in a blink of an eye, it's over. The French Revolution happens. What does she do? How does she survive and thrive?

• 17:51Speaker 02

  It's such a dramatic moment. Well, initially, she takes refuge with family and friends. She sort of goes into hiding in Paris. And then at the moment that the mobs are gathering to force the royal family back into Paris from Versailles, she leaves. She gets into a carriage with her very young daughter and the governess and off they go. They just leave. And I, I do think it's a moment to sort of pause on. There she is, this celebrated, established woman artist, woman artist, against all the odds. And as you say, blink of an eye, she's got to move on. I think she's so strategic is, is the word that always echoes in my head.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  And so she goes to the places where she knows other French emigres are going, but also where there are academies, where there are connections, where there are royal connections. So she goes to Bologna, she goes to Rome, she kind of gathers up associations with academies and awards. As she travels and she ends up at the court of Naples and Sicily where the beloved older sister of Marie Antoinette is queen and she becomes a very important sort of facilitator and patron. And it's while she's in Naples that she begins to meet and paint people who prove very important to her in her further steps. So she's eventually to move on to Vienna and St Petersburg. But first she very much wants to go back to Paris in seventeen ninety-two and she

• 19:16Speaker 02

  thinks that's sort of on the cards. But then the French monarchy falls.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  I was going to say.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That's not the year.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  That was a misjudgment.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was, that was the wrong call. Thankfully, she didn't actually get there. So at this point, she moves on to Vienna. And in Vienna, she's commanding such prices that the French emigres, who for a while were part of her coterie, they were people she might gravitate towards, they can't afford her anymore because they're broke, because they've had to leave France and, you know, leave all their belongings. And it's in Vienna that she meets the Russian ambassador, Count Andrey Razumovski, the man who later, in eighteen oh six, commissions from Beethoven the Razumovski Quartets. So a very cultured, flamboyant person who loved hosting a great soiree and a great party.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  And through him, she becomes really well acquainted with some of these sort of preposterously wealthy Russians who are moving around various different.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Preposterously wealthy Russians, surely not.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  A lot of them around in those days.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  So Vienna, of course, was a very lively place at the, at the time, but we'll, we'll come on to St Petersburg.

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• 23:17Speaker 05

  Robert Wenley, let's go back to Naples because there she meets Emma Hamilton.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting episode and relationship. So born Amy Lyon, actually, in the Wirral. She adopted various names, but eventually called herself Emma Hart and came to the attention of the youngest son of the Earl of Warwick, who took her on as his mistress. And in that circle, she then started sort of posing for artists, notably Romney. And she's particularly notable for her looks. She was just very beautiful, but had what was seen at the time as sort of Grecian features, antique Grecian features. And she would dress up in antique clothing, or as understood at the time, and adopt these poses or attitudes like tableau vivant.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Eventually, Lord Greville got tired of her, we're told, and passed her on charmingly to his uncle, who was Sir William Hamilton in Naples. And she was by this time, she was very noted throughout Europe. Goethe, for instance, had seen her attitudes and praised them. So she was seen as this sort of living representation of ancient Greek art.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  And was Vige Lebrun able to experiment with that, as it were?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  The portraits she made of her and their three principal ones and some sort of variants of them, she would regard them not as portraits but as history paintings. Because although they have her facial features, she's posed in allegorical guise, so as a Bacchante or as Ariadne or in other cases as the Kumeian cybil. So she's in these historical mythological guises. And I think that reflects partly how Vige Lebrun understood her status. She wasn't one of the high society. She was a mistress. So she was depicted and considered in a slightly different way. But they're very effective paintings and she was very proud of particularly the Emma as a cybil. And she actually retained this painting, the prime version of it, and took it with

• 25:17Speaker 01

  her on her travels and it had a notoriety of its own and attracted people to her.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  So Francesca, what was it that people were expecting when they commissioned Vige Lebrun to paint them? What could she do for you that other portraitists wouldn't?

• 25:32Speaker 06

  I think what people are seeking if they're commissioning Vige Lebrun to paint their portrait is a sort of posed informality, if you will. I think there is something that she brings to the portrait that is lively and we have, you know, descriptions at the time when the portraits are shown at the salons, for example, in Paris, in the salon exhibitions, that she has this incredible ability to get a sense of people's character or the kind of vivacity of the sitters. You know, I think today, you know, we think of her portraits as being very flattering, very elegant. And I think there's always this sort of sense of a sort of slightly negative cadence there. But actually, you know, even if you were the very wealthiest person in eighteenth century Europe, how many times, I mean, unless you're Marie Antoinette, how many times are you going to be painted in a portrait in your life?

• 26:16Speaker 06

  I mean, maybe half a dozen at the most. So sort of why would you not want to be shown in your best light? And I think that's what Vige brings. You know, in a Vige portrait that, you know, it's not going to be rigid, it's not going to be sort of fixed, it'll, there'll be a sort of fluttering of the draperies, there'll, there'll be a sense, you know, in your face as well as the sitter of the kind of liveliness of your character.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  Yes, looking at all her work, she manages to convey an emotion each time. And it struck me as rather, rather modern and rather daring and actually rather forward looking.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  I think it is. And I think it's quite difficult for us, obviously, we live in a photographic world and, and, you know, we know everything that comes after. But actually, it's not true, but there is this idea that Vige Lebrun is the inventor of the smile in portraiture. It's absolutely, I mean, that's a preposterous claim and it's not, it's not true. But it is true that if you were to be wandering or, you know, wandering through a picture gallery of this era, looking around, one of the ways in which you can identify a Vige portrait is actually, you know, that has sitters who often have this kind of half smile. It's one of the first times really that you can constantly see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers, but, but it's true. And I think it is about this kind of studied informality. There's, it's not, they're not casual because obviously portraits take so long to paint and they're such expensive things and they are still very, very much luxury objects.

• 27:29Speaker 06

  But I think there is something that she is bringing in this, whether it's her relationship with the sitter or the kind of rapport they can establish or the, even a sort of movement in the composition that people are really drawn to, kind of understandably.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Polly, we got to Vienna where she runs into a lot of Russian oligarchs or princes or whatever they were at the time. And she decides to go off to St Petersburg. What happens in St Petersburg?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  In St Petersburg. So she undertakes this extraordinary journey over several months. You know, she is so intrepid, this woman, whatever else you say about her, she is, you know, she is no shrinking violet. She will head out there. So she goes off through Lithuania, she goes through Corland, up the coast of Estonia. Beautiful, beautiful journey. And she gets to St Petersburg. According to her memoirs, and we may come back to those because they are not reliable, but according to her memoirs, she meets Catherine the Great within a couple of days and there's a very courteous exchange and the empress is very flattering to her. And she lands this great commission, which is to portray two of Catherine's granddaughters. So the older two daughters of Paul, Catherine the Great's son.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  And she produces a portrait and she's very pleased with it, but things don't go that well because the empress really takes against it. And she says of the, of this portrait, she says, "My two granddaughters look like two pug dogs basking in the sun," in one of her letters. And in another one, she says, "They're like monkeys grimacing." And she says, "People don't know which one's the older and which one's the younger."

• 28:58Speaker 05

  Do you think that was a fair criticism?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is, we don't have the first painting, but therein lies a tale because Vige, in her memoirs, A, she claims that this isn't the empress's response at all, it's actually that of her latest lover, a man called Platon Zubov. And she says, "It's all his fault. He didn't like it." And actually, the empress really did like it. But we know from letters to, for example, Baron von Grimm, that the empress really did take against it. So she was asked to repaint it. And in her memoir, she implies that it was just, you know, a little bit of an adjustment and adding some sleeves. She'd portrayed them initially in tunics and she gives them lovely long sleeves, that then the empress is satisfied. But actually, X-rays show that there are.

• 29:43Speaker 06

  There are no changes to the painting as it survives. So she did paint it afresh. And that was the sort of thing you didn't want to get out there. So she managed not, you know, she managed to sort of quash that story by pretending she just had to, you know, just a, a couple of small pentimenti and all was well.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  But despite having irritated the Empress, it doesn't appear to have damaged her reputation in St Petersburg. She stays for a while, doesn't she?

• 30:08Speaker 06

  She stays for six years. She does incredibly well. And she, very soon after the slightly ill-fated portrait of these young granddaughters, she portrays the wife of Catherine the Great's grandson, oldest grandson, a woman called Grand Duchess Elizaveta Alexeevna. And this is another huge great state portrait that is superb. I was a bit disobliging of one of the early ones of Marie Antoinette. This one is absolutely fabulous. And that is well received by the Empress. And they meet in the Winter Palace for the Empress to have a look at it and give her verdict. And the verdict is given. And again, in Vige's memoirs, she says that in that meeting,

• 30:51Speaker 06

  Catherine was so impressed by it that slightly grudgingly, she says, everybody is saying that you should paint my portrait. I will sit for you. Let's turn to that quite soon. But just a few days later, the Empress dies of almost certainly a stroke. So that portrait never came about. Again, because we can't rely on the memoirs, it may be that that was a very convenient fiction. But coming back to a sort of more positive way of thinking about Vige, what she managed consummately well was to stay in favour in the Vipers' Nest that could be the Russian Court.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  Robert Wenley, while she was in Russia, Vige painted Countess Golovina. And that painting hangs at the Barber Institute where you are presently employed. What does that tell us about her skills? That, that portrait, which again, looking at it, there's something very compelling about her expression.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a much-loved painting in the Barber. I think many people would say it's their favourite painting of our collection. And it's certainly one of her most successful paintings made while she was in Russia. I think there's no doubt about that. It's a very engaging painting, above all. The way that Golovina is posed, she's looking at you straight on and you can't really escape her brown eyes. They just bore into you. She is also, holds around her body tightly, a bright red wrap, scarlet wrap, which is probably a studio prop, but it's done in a way that evokes, again, paintings by Rubens and Titian. So she's evoking the old masters.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  It's slightly sort of erotic, I suppose, in the pose, in the way that the body's so tightly wrapped like that. But it's above all the expression that captivates you. The head is, and the figure is against a very spare background, sort of monochrome background, but just a diagonal streak of light. So it's really much the head and the pose that really engages you. And I think this is an example of where she's really responding with warmth to the sitter. And where she, we know from her memoirs that she really, we know that she really appreciated the sitter on a personal level and engaged with them. I think that really comes out in the paintings. And we know from her own memoirs, and this is also backed up by Golovina's own memoirs,

• 33:17Speaker 01

  that they had a very close relationship, that Vige Lebrun appreciated Golovina's wit, her musical ability, she apparently composed and sang love songs, and also a talented drawing. And up on all the latest literature from Paris, it's a great masterpiece.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  Thank you, Robert. Francesca, what is it that is enduring about Vige?

• 33:41Speaker 06

  I think there are a few things. I mean, I think one, inevitably, you know, she is an artist, as all artists are, painting in their time and their moment. And I think the, the nature of who she's painting and the moment in which she's working means that she does give us this extraordinary glimpse, certainly in the French context, of the last gasp of the Ancien Régime, if you will. You know, we just see these incredible likenesses of all these characters who go on, many of them to have untimely deaths or long periods as emigres and everything else. So I think there is this sense that, you know, she kind of captures Europe at this particular moment. Or whether it's, you know, with Emma Hamilton in Naples or other people across the courts that she travels to. For me, the, maybe the slight injustice that we do with Vige is because these are very dazzling portraits

• 34:24Speaker 06

  and they're very engaging at a kind of surface level. I mean, literally her painted surfaces, she's fabulous at painting fabrics. She really does paint these beautiful complexions, these very engaging sitters. I think there's been a tendency to look at her or treat her as if everything is just surface. Whereas in fact, I do think this is an artist who's thinking very carefully about what her legacy will be and positioning herself in the sort of continuum, in the canon, if you will, of the old masters. So we know that she copies old master paintings early on in her career. We know before she marries, the art dealer Lebrun, you know, he's lending her works, you know, even as they're living in the same house for her to copy. You know, the entrance into the academy is so important to her. It means so much to her that she would be able to do that, you know.

• 35:09Speaker 06

  And actually, when it happens in the end, it's done on, on order of the king. And, and, you know, she's sort of slightly disparaged for it. But throughout her career, throughout her compositions, we see this kind of engagement with, you know, old master painting that I think, I do think that is actually something of hers that endures. I think there is a way of seeing her in this context where she, she is taking herself very, very seriously and maybe asking us to do the same.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Polly, you wanted to come in there.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  I mean, I couldn't agree more that, and I, I really enforce the idea, there is an intellectualism to her thinking and to her planning of her portraits. And Robert talked about the portraits of Emma Hamilton. You know, they're not, it's not serendipitous that they're coming out the way they are and, and are, can be very compellingly positioned as a sort of history painting portrait.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  She wanted to see herself as a history artist but couldn't really penetrate that elite, as it were.

• 36:02Speaker 06

  But it's interesting when, so Francesca was talking about her admission to the French Academy, which, as you say, was, was slightly tainted because she was married to an art dealer. And academicians were never meant to be involved in the grubby matter of buying and selling art. You know, perish the thought. And so even being married to an art dealer disqualified her from being elected to the Academy. And, you know, going back in her history, what we're doing here is that so that Marie Antoinette asked Louis XVI to intervene. And so in effect, it was by a royal fiat that she was admitted to the Academy. And people held that against her as, you know, she's been, you know, she's got in through the back door. But when she was admitted as her presentation piece, she painted a history painting,

• 36:45Speaker 06

  which is a real statement of, you know, and I can do this. You might have seen my portraits of Marie Antoinette or of all the other figures in, in Paris she was painting at that point. And she also, much later, and I don't think, I think these two things are connected. In 1800, she is admitted as an, what was called an honorary free associate. So it's a very high honorific position to the Russian Academy, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. And for that, she describes, you know, beautifully every moment of the admission ceremony. She describes walking into the hall, it's a room I've been in. The Academy of Arts in St Petersburg is in the same building it was in when she was there.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  And she describes walking up through sort of serried ranks of admirers to the president. At that time, a man called Stroganov. And she's just clearly really proud because here's her moment of doing it on her own merits, without any intervention from anybody else. And it's sort of, this is mine, this is my achievement.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  Robert Wenley, what did Vige make of England? And what did England make of her?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yes, good question. So it's a little known fact that she actually visited England between 1803 and 1805 in a, in a period when there was sort of peace briefly between France and England, a break in the Napoleonic Wars. So she was able to come over and, as it were, try her luck with the English court and English society. It was a little bit of a disappointment in the sense that she didn't much like the weather in London. It was sort of damp and. Dirty, as she described it, the fact that no one did anything on a Sunday, she found a bit depressing. So those were some of the negatives. On the positive side, she loved getting out and about. She went to the sort of spa towns, Bath and Brighton and Tunbridge Wells, over to the Isle of Wight. She, again, connected with the French

• 38:38Speaker 01

  emigre and the Russian emigre community, such as it was. Wherever she went, she was trying to recreate those golden years at the end of the Ancien Régime, always trying to go back to that golden age for her. She did meet sympathetic people. There was a Mrs. Chinery. She was a sort of patron of the arts. And she managed to get a commission from the Prince of Wales, which was another big deal, the future George IV.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  So she was maintaining her standards, even if she found the weather.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, she didn't stay as long as she did in Russia, and she was partly constrained from leaving earlier because of resumption of hostilities between England and France. That's not to say that she didn't make some interesting portraits here, and she still was able to command high prices and still met opposition from local artists.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  Francesca, about the local artists and other artists and critics, because she did incredibly well commercially, let's face it. But what did her fellow artists and what did the critics say of her at the time?

• 39:40Speaker 06

  Maybe the best we can say is that she had a mixed critical reception. So I mean, if you go back through the write-ups and the commentaries on the salon in Paris and the exhibitions there, both the Salon de la Croyce Pendant, and then once she's become an academician, she's able to exhibit at the kind of the main academy salon as well. And it is really sort of a tale of two halves, because on the one hand, you have these descriptions of these beautiful portraits, you know, a large amount of these salon accounts is given over to Vige Lebrun. There's much discussion of what she's exhibiting. There are compliments about the vivacity of the sitters, the touche, you know, the actually the way she has painted them, the flair that she brings to portraiture. And yet, there is at the same time, this

• 40:21Speaker 06

  very clear discomfort with whether it's, you know, the femininity of these portraits, whether it's the idea that they're more flattering than they are truthful, whether it's a sense that she's using her own femininity, that were she not a woman artist, would we be, even then, they're saying, would we be remarking on these in the same way if they weren't painted by a woman? And in fact, you know, there is this this long-running rumor, which gets written about quite a bit, that there's this poor, heart-sick young artist who's so in love with her, that actually he's not only just finishing her portraits, but actually, maybe he's painting the whole thing secretly. And the whole, the whole idea of Vige Lebrun is a kind of sham. And, you know, and the idea that it's actually genuinely easier for people in the French art world to believe that, to believe that

• 41:05Speaker 06

  the whole thing is a kind of elaborate hoax, rather than to to kind of confront the realities of a young, attractive, very talented, very commercially successful portraitist. It's fascinating.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Polly, she gets her own back when she writes her memoirs, but people don't really believe the memoirs, do they? Her memoirs, her memoirs, her memoirs are enigmatic and confounding and a brilliant read, partly because she can be so waspish about people. I mean, she can just be so unkind. There's one woman she really has it in for, the Duchess de Mazarin, who is stout and ugly and, you know, lots of very, very sort of unkind words. But the best bit is she describes a dinner party where the Duchess apparently decided, it's a dinner party for 100 guests, and the Duchess decides that she will have her cook serve an enormous

• 41:58Speaker 05

  pie, in which there are 100 tiny living birds. And with great, you know, sort of rigmarole, the pie is cut open. But all these birds fly up and they decide to settle in the hairdos of the guests, which are these, you know, vast powdered wigs heading up skywards. It's a comic read at times. But the bit that becomes complicated is when, you know, as an art historian or a cultural historian, you're trying to work out what relations might actually have been like. And one of the like motifs throughout the memoirs is she's ever demonstrating ways in which very high-placed patrons were incredibly kind to her because she was such a sort of deserving person. So early doors, she talks about

• 42:43Speaker 05

  missing a sitting with Marie Antoinette because she was heavily pregnant and going to apologize the next day, and being so flustered that she drops her paints, and that Marie Antoinette herself bends down to pick them up. And then much later, in St Petersburg, she talks about Grand Duchess Elizaveta Alexievna, who, when Vige felt faint, you know, brings her water and brings her round. And then, in the least likely of many examples of this, there's a moment when Alexander I comes to the throne in Russia, and he apparently goes so far as to get off his horse in the street to greet her and say, you must do an equestrian portrait. Now, she's never done an equestrian portrait in in her life,

• 43:24Speaker 05

  so the probability of this is is really quite low. It's a complicated history if you're looking for a historical record. Francesca, a brief comment from you on that.

• 43:33Speaker 06

  I don't disagree at all, Polly, with what what you've said and about the unreliability of the memoirs. The only thing that it does, in the context of talking about Vige Lebrun, seem important to point out is that I think the unreliability of artists' memoirs is actually a trope of the genre itself. And I think I do feel that we maybe comment a little bit more on Vige Lebrun's unreliability, more than we would say the very, very many male artists who have these wonderful stories about being child prodigies and scribbling drawings everywhere and being picked up and young genius, and these wonderful patrons who meet them in the street. I'm just, it's not that I disagree with you at all, but I do think it's interesting that, art historically, critically, we all kind of hone in on it with Vige Lebrun in a way that we perhaps don't.

• 44:13Speaker 05

  So true. Robert, a final word from you. Her reputation today?

• 44:18Speaker 01

  It's interesting where we are with her, actually, because there have been very few exhibitions on her. There was one in 1982 and one in 2015, neither of which came to this country. I'm glad to say at the Barbe, we are doing one next year, 2027, on her work that's in England and connections with England. But where she sits in sort of feminist canon is a matter of some debate, because she obviously was remarkably successful. She was, in many ways, exceptional. But she was also very much tied to the Ancien Régime, so that makes it difficult in a political sense. She was quite dismissive of less wealthy people. And as I said earlier, she was always trying to go back, to heart

• 44:59Speaker 01

  back to that golden time as she saw it. She was very much pro the Bourbon dynasty. She didn't like Napoleon and all he stood for. So I think she's a complex character. She should be perhaps better known and more widely known in terms of her great masterpieces and the range of her work. It's not just female subjects. It's not just queens. There's amazing portraits of artists, of singers, not just aristocrats.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Francesca, her reputation?

• 45:26Speaker 06

  I think growing, I think we also have more work to do. I think actually, the more work that is done, the more complexity comes out of Vige Lebrun. And I think even if you're looking at her, you know, it's relatively recently, the large group of pastels that she made, pastel landscapes, were discovered that she made on her travels, you know, not the kind of flashy court portraits, but actually, just, you know, a way of looking at someone who's introduced art through this medium by her father, and then, you know, 50 years later is still doing them on her travels in Switzerland. I think there's a lot more for us to uncover and a lot more to take seriously.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  Polly, your verdict? She was competitive. She was audacious. She was fearless. She was self-assured. She absolutely deserves the rise in interest that is happening now. My thanks to Robert Wenley, Francesca Whitlam-Cooper, and Polly Blakesley, and also to producer Simon Tillotson, as it's his last time in this studio after 11 years as the great engine of In Our Time. Next week, it's seashells in the oceans and, of course, on the seashore. Thank you for listening.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Good. So now, what I wanted to know, which we didn't really touch on, and that is her personal relationships, and in particular with the daughter. The daughter, it seems to me, to have been a very, that's a very complicated relationship. Any of you got thoughts on that?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, she was, Julie, the daughter, was the subject of those maternal portraits.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  Beautiful portraits.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Beautiful portraits. And she seems, we would, you'd take from those portraits, certainly really doted on her in her early life. But then, the relationship seems to deteriorate it and quite dramatically.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  But she follows her around the European courts.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yes. So she joins her, well, she duly marries the secretary to the director of the Imperial Theatre, Theatres in Russia. But it's, it's a marriage that she doesn't approve of, this is Vige Lebrun. And things deteriorate from that point. And it's a rather sad ending to Julie's life. She ends up being, dying in poverty, even though her mother is one of the, you know, wealthiest people around. So there was clearly a big breakdown in their relationship, which you wouldn't guess from those very early double portraits.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  I think, in a way, that's sort of mirrored across her, her life. I mean, in a way, it's so unusual, actually, to come across someone in the 18th or early 19th century who lives to almost 87. But then you realise, actually, that, you know, in the 1810s, she loses her brother with whom she's been very close, you know, Julie dies, her husband, you know, obviously, they do, they separate, and there's a financial, you know, disentangling. But, you know, when she returns to France, she goes back to live in the Hotel Le Brun with him. She loses all these people and then lives for another, you know, 25 years. It must have been.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Is it true that the husband was a gambler?

• 48:34Speaker 06

  Yes. So I think the husband is, you know, a fantastic art dealer, also likes gambling, also likes prostitutes. And, you know, as you alluded to, Robert, you know, the the nature of the art market is you need a lot of money to make a lot of money. And so having a wife who's commanding all these fantastic prices is very useful for kind of the liquidity purposes of his business, literally kind of keeping the kind of, you know, buying and selling in play. But they're also, I mean, incredibly lavish. The Hotel Le Brun that they build in Paris is this, you know, vast space, you know, with, with, you know, grand sort of, sort of hallway corridors between his areas and her areas and, you know, fantastic objects and everything within. It must have been very sumptuous.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  So there was a sort of transactional aspect to that relationship with the husband in as much that he introduced her to the Dutch and Belgian masters and that, that world of art collectors. And she provided the cash and also the cachet, I would presume, of being such an important artist. Very much so. And one of the things I think she is unfairly pilloried for, and you made a good point earlier, Francesca, about how we hold her to a different standard than we do so often with.

• 49:47Speaker 06

  Men, there's many things she's criticised for, but that was common among people at the time. But one of the things that she was criticised for was not mentoring other women artists. Yeah. So this was, you know, sort of at the time, there's meant to be this idea that, oh, you're a successful woman artist, therefore it's incumbent on you. And other, other women artists of the time did. But it may well be that her husband didn't want her to spend her time doing that because he needed her income. You know, he was very reliant on that and to keep, you know, sort of lubricating his art trade because of the, as Robert said, the expense of the objects he was buying. But the other things where I feel that she is, you know, she has been criticised for being

• 50:31Speaker 06

  very sort of glib about massive social inequality around her. So, you know, undoubtedly she said things which can be, you know, can make for uncomfortable reading about she's on an Italian island having some exquisite picnic and grateful hermits are given the sort of crumbs from their table, they're given the leftovers. And then she talks about being in Vienna and never seeing a beggar and then she gets to Russia and um, postilions, she took, I mean, in a really troubling um, passage, she talks about sort of postilions on carriages, young boys of sort of eight or nine, wearing really thin winter coats through the Russian winter. And she says, isn't it marvellous, they're so hardy, whereas a sort of, you know, a, a, a French grenadier would really struggle in this,

• 51:16Speaker 06

  in this climate. But my point is that that was how certain classes spoke, you know, and that was how men spoke an awful lot and people were, you know, somebody who had successfully climbed to the heights the way that she did. They did adopt myopia to, to, to the reality of life around them because they needed to happily sort of socialise with the elite circles they were in and needed to adopt those attitudes.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  It, it, it strikes me that she was a, a feminist, not by intent, but by example. She led by example about how do you break through these systems? You're looking sceptical there, Francesca.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  No, I mean, I just, I do, I think Vijay and feminism is such a kind of interesting and fraught question. Because I mean, the, the, the counterpoint that's often made is with the, you know, probably even lesser known artists today, Adelée La Biguilla, who is admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris in the same year as Vijay. But she, La Biguilla, goes in the sort of proper way, if you will. So she's nominated by a male academician, she submits a reception piece in the formal way. She's accepted as a painter in portraits, whereas Vijay, as you were saying, Polly, just kind of, you know, put in there by, by the king. And the comparison that's always made with the two is that, you know, La Biguilla is much more political. She's, I mean, very much in favour of the revolution, but she also runs a studio, which is very much about educating women.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  And this idea that, you know, that all women, you know, not all women, but women deserve an opportunity to paint that, you know, they have to be let into all these institutions and everything else in a way that, while I think Vijay is very keen for it for herself, I, I feel as if feminism or the kind of feminist literature has, has struggled to kind of, what to make of someone who's, a woman who is very personally successful, but isn't necessarily paving the way for the people behind.

• 53:04Speaker 05

  But that's what I mean by, by example, I, you know, how do you overcome the, the social and political barriers facing you if you're a, if you're a woman? Because one of the things that strikes me about her is she was tough, she was a tough businesswoman.

• 53:20Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. In all those different countries she visited, you know, she had to find her own way and make a success of it. I think, you know, there's, there's no doubt that that is that determination that sees her through in her industry. She was, I mean, she produced maybe a thousand works, she was one of the most productive artists of her day.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  A thousand works?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Up to, yeah, circulated, I mean, that's just amazing. So she probably didn't have much time, you know, to.

• 53:43Speaker 06

  To be nurturing other things.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  Where, where are they all now?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Where are they all? Well, uh, they are scattered across the world, but um, the main centres of her work would be Paris, Russia and America. Um, so those are the biggest concentrations, particularly the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Louvre and the Horsay in France, and then um, in America in the Met and National Gallery in Washington are sort of the main um, conglomerations of her work. Here in London, we have four paintings by her and another at Windsor, so that's not bad going.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  And one at the Barber Institute.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  One at the Barber.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  Really? Which is one of the best.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  How did that end up at the Barber Institute?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, that's a real outlier because I would say the taste for her work is an interesting subject to study. Um, and it historically, collectors as opposed to patrons have tended to be very wealthy, super wealthy people who had a taste for the Enchanted regime and all it stood for in terms of the sort of luxury arts. And so you get Rothschilds and Lord Hertford, the founder of the Hertford Wallace collection. Those sort of collectors in America, the super sort of wealthy of the, of the Gilded Age. And so to buy a painting by Vigilaburn in nineteen eighty was a really strange thing. Um, which is what the, the director of the Barber did, Hamish Miles. But he said, it's, it's still in our records that he wanted to buy a painting by Vigilaburn to, as it were,

• 55:11Speaker 01

  offer a challenge to Reynolds and Gainsborough by whom he already had portraits. So that, that's quite an interesting take for nineteen eighty, I think, uh, to do that. And it's, it's still one of the very few works that has been acquired in this country by her in, in relatively recent years. So it's a bit of an outlier, but hopefully more people will be taking note of her work.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  It's better than what we have in our archives, which is that, um, when the National Gallery acquires the self-portrait in eighteen ninety seven, it's a write-up in a newspaper that says, well, it's very nice, but it's got absolutely no skill, talent or anything good about it. It's a skillful work of the plum box order. I think it's this idea of being sort of chocolate boxy and decorative, but with nothing, nothing beyond that, so, um.

• 55:54Speaker 05

  That's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? I mean.

• 55:56Speaker 06

  Of its time.

• 55:57Speaker 05

  That was of it, that critique is of its time, obviously.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Of its time, I do think some of, I think some of that lingers though, this sense of things that are merely decorative or surface and don't have much depth to them. I think the challenge now is to. That, that, that there is such weight and there's such gravitas to some of her pictures, but because she was such a consummate painter, she was brilliant with the brush. She could do, you know, hair like nobody else and fur and all of those things. And, and people get a bit stuck on that without moving beyond it.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  I think she should be seen as one of the great colourists in art. I mean, obviously that influence of Rubens comes through there. But her skill, uh, in that respect is really outstanding and that's one of the things that make, makes her work so memorable.

• 56:37Speaker 06

  Hmm. And I love the fact, if I may, that in, in her self-portraits, she really does focus on showing her skills. So showing herself at work on a canvas. And the one that she was commissioned to paint for the Uffizi, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Marie Antoinette. And decades later, when she was admitted to the Russian Academy of Arts, um, she produces a, a self-portrait. But in this one, she shows herself at work on a portrait of Maria Fyodorovna, who was the wife of Paul the First, who was herself a really significant amateur artist. And I love that there's something sort of almost cyclical about it. But later in life, she, there's this kind of, um, there is a relationship between two artists coming from such different places and living in, in different lives.

• 57:22Speaker 06

  But nonetheless, they would have met and they would have talked to each other about what they were trying to produce or what they were producing.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  And she also received com- commissions from, uh, Potemkin, Potemkin?

• 57:33Speaker 06

  She did, slightly uncomfortable ones of, um, so Potemkin had five nieces. Um, Potemkin being one of Catherine the Great's, well, arguably her greatest paramour, and the one with whom she maintained a very, very close, uh, relationship long after their, um, affair came to an end. But he had five nieces and he had intimate relations with three of them when they were sort of early to mid teens. And there, there's one especially, a Katarina Skavronskaya,

• 58:03Speaker 05

  Or five?

• 58:04Speaker 06

  Who was married to the ambassador, the Russian ambassador to Sicily, but she stayed in St Petersburg. Um, you know, very much under his control and he commissions a portrait, well, he commissions many portraits of her, as does her husband, in a, a, a really unnerving sort of competitive way. Um, but, but, but they are, but she, she becomes um, stereotyped as this very sensual creature, there's, you know, folds of fabric falling between her legs. And all the writing about her, of which there's an extensive passage in Vijay's memoirs, they talk about her being sort of completely vacuous and without spirit and without interest and she lies around on a divan. But there's bits of the story that are really disturbing.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  She, the sitter, Skavronskaya, talks of only being able to sleep if she has, um, she, her words, a slave, lying under her bed, sort of reciting stories to her. And it's hard not to speculate that this is, you know, this is some sort of traumatic, ongoing sort of traumatic experience playing out. Um, so yeah, Potemkin is an uncomfortable figure in this story. Wow.

• 59:10Speaker 05

  Anything else before Simon comes in for a final time with his tea and coffee offering?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Pick up, picking up on what Francesca, um, started to say about pastels and landscapes. Um, there are, according to Vijay's memoirs, um, she made some a hundred pastels in England as well of sea scapes and landscapes, which have just disappeared.

• 59:31Speaker 06

  Yet to be found.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  So, um, do look out, everyone.

• 59:35Speaker 05

  So.

• 59:36Speaker 06

  Local auction.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  Art sleuths, here's an alert for you. Thank you all very much, that was, uh, that was such fun, I really enjoyed it.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Right, well, um, we'd like to your coffee for last.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  Tea, please.

• 59:48Speaker 06

  And Simon, congratulations, it's eleven years. No, it didn't, oh, nice, thank you.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Tea, please, go.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  So that's four teas.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Four teas.

• 59:56Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Oh, is that for Simon?

• 59:59Speaker 06

  Oh, wow, lucky us.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  In Our Time with Misha Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

• 1:00:13Speaker 06

  So Alice Lockston, I'm here for the history. Well, Ben Henderson, I like the formality and that's perfect because we have a lot of history to share. Why did tea become such a British obsession? How did English turn into the language we speak today? And yes, why do women's clothes still not have pockets? Well, in our new podcast, Here for the History, we're investigating how stories from the past shape everyday life today. Basically the things we've all noticed but never stopped to question. Listen on BBC Sounds. Or watch on YouTube. Just search for Here for the History.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safford Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new programme that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy. Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at Safford Credit dot com. If you're in an open chapter thirteen bankruptcy, recently filed a chapter seven, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly thirty years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit Safford Credit dot com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.